Hailee Steinfeld, Elle Fanning, Chloe Moretz—these preteen fashion stars don’t hold a candle on the latest obsession of the fashion world, Thylane Lena-Rose Blondeau. She has waist-length blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, and has been compared to Brigitte Bardot. She just happens to be 10 years old.
Blondeau has starred in several provocative magazine spreads, she walked the runway for Jean Paul Gaultier at the age of 4, and she even appeared nearly topless. While many images of her are largely age-appropriate (such as her shoot for French Vogue’s children’s supplement last December), others push the envelope. For a spread in a recent issue of the grown-up version of French Vogue that was guest-edited by Tom Ford, the 10-year-old appeared fully made up, with red nails and high heels, spread out over a leopard-print couch.
With her increased visibility on the pages of fashion magazines and in ads, Blondeau has become an Internet sensation—and incited a recent outcry among bloggers who say she’s way too young to be portrayed so sexually. “That is child pornography, and it is WRONG,” wrote one Tumblr user. “This isn’t edgy,” wrote another. “It’s inappropriate, and creepy, and I never want to see a nine-year-old in high-heels leopard print bedroom slippers ever again.” A blog dedicated to the model called “F--k Yeah Thylane Blondeau” changed its name on Tuesday to “Thylane Blondeau Pictures,” with its owner explaining simply: “I’ll come back to it if she continues modeling when she’s older.” She explains that she’s been getting a barrage of emails about the star, “either messages about how much you love her or that she’s a prostitute.”
Little is known about the child model, other than the fact that she was born in Ivory Coast in 2001. Her father is a 43-year-old defender on a French amateur soccer league, and her mother is a leggy TV personality who had cameos on a few French sitcoms in the 1990s. Neither has spoken publicly about Thylane’s modeling career—but it’s clear from many of their appearances when she was a toddler that they’re comfortable exposing their daughter to the limelight.
This year, high-end fashion labels have embraced pretty young things like never before. Though runway models have an age minimum of 16, there are no regulations that dictate age in editorial spreads and ads. As The Daily Beast first reported, Miu Miu chose Hailee Steinfeld, the 14-year-old star of True Grit, as the face of its fall 2011 campaign. And designers are competing to dress the next "it" girl—the younger the better. The 12-year-old Elle Fanning, star of Somewhere, has been the “girl to dress” in Hollywood, appearing on the red carpet wearing everything from Rodarte to Marc Jacobs. After she appeared in a fashion spread in Interview, the magazine’s entertainment editor, Lauren Tabach-Bank, told us: “It sounds crazy to say someone has a good figure at 12—but she captures a youthful spirit … She’s not oversexed, but she can wear clothing well.”
t is remarkable that in a world walloped by economic recession, when there are wars, uprisings, carbon
controversies and assaults on liberty, people can muster up the passion to protest against a beauty pageant.
Listening to the mix of mums and feminists who have taken up arms against an American-style junior beauty
pageant in Melbourne over the past week, you could be forgiven for thinking that this rather innocent parade
of pretty princess-wannabes is something akin to the seventh circle of hell.
"These children are absolutely being put in harm's way", declared child psychotherapist Collet Smart, who
somehow, by osmosis maybe, seems to know better than parents themselves what is good for their children.
Smart took a look around the pageant, braving the noxious fumes in the clouds of fake-tan spray and the
stench of cheap perfume in order that she could report to the horrified world outside what goes on inside
these ugly beauty pageants.
The terrible sights she beheld will be burned into her memory forever. "There was a four-year-old dressed up
as Lady Gaga", she reported. "And there was Sandy from Grease, in the black leathers." Oh, the humanity!
Apparently there is only one solution to this travesty of childish dressing-up: call the cops. Smart
declared that "those parents" (you know who she means: bogans who prettify their daughters) "are allowing
[their children] to be judged and so that means that we need to have the state involved, yes".
So the state should intervene every time a parent allows their kid to be judged? Does that mean we will soon
see the forces of the state barging into concert halls in which 10-year-olds battle it out to see who is the
best violinist - or is it only the largely suburban mums who love to put their little girls in pink dresses
and tiny high heels who should be investigated and possibly reprimanded by the powers-that-be? Yes, I
thought so.
Bernie Geary, the inaugural child safety commissioner in Victoria, has actually been asked by the protesters
to investigate whether entering a child into a beauty pageant constitutes child abuse.
This stretches the definition of "child abuse" to breaking point, so that it can apparently include not only
beatings and serious neglect but also having a harmless costume-based pastime that presumably both parent
and child enjoys. What next - arrest "those parents" who allow their littl'uns to go out dressed like
vampires (evil and sexy) or ghosts (dead and scary) on Halloween?
The most outrageous language has been used to describe the mums who let their daughters enter beauty
pageants. They've been called "creepy" and "crazy", and have even been accused of prostituting their
daughters – "Primp or pimp?" said one particularly provocative headline, while others have said these girls
are "fodder for paedophiles".
A lot of this is driven by naked, old-fashioned, bogan-bashing snobbery, a deep disdain for those suburban
folk who have such inferior pastimes to the more decent sections of society.
Just look at some of the online discussion threads, where "cashed-up bogans" are slated for forcing their
daughters to pluck their eyebrows and parade around in cheerleader gear, while others call on the authors of
the super-snobby site Things Bogans Like to add an entry on "the bogan fodder that is kiddie beauty
pageants". Some Australians are discussing their fellow Australians in almost anthropological terms, viewing
their cultural habits in the same way that those British bible-bashing missionaries to Africa looked with
horror upon the clothing and dancing style of tribal women and their over-sexualised offspring.
These unhinged haters of beauty pageants seriously need to calm down. Girls have been dressing up as little
women for as long as mirrors have existed, whether they were standing in their mum's high heels and using a
hairbursh to lip-synch to Madonna songs or wearing mini-skirts a year or two before their fathers would have
preferred.
Many of the critics of beauty pageants claim that these events "sexualise" young girls. There is indeed a
problem with child sexualisation today, but the pageant-protesters have picked the wrong target.
At a time when experts and officialdom have developed the very bad habit of interpreting many forms of
childish behaviour as being sexual, from old-style games like "doctors and nurses" to the sending of rude
text messages, it is a bit bizarre to blame a handful of pageant-loving mums for sexualising kids.
We live in an era when it seems that childish or teenage behaviour can no longer be treated simply as
harmless fun or experimentation. So those oracles of wisdom, child psychologists, frequently call for sex
education to be taught to children at the earliest opportunity, in order to help them understand and
negotiate interaction between the sexes, while teens who send each other "sext messages" can end up on the
Sex Offenders Register.
Cabdriver Judie Curry doesn't like picking up drunken women.
"They just have awful attitudes," she said.
"They're always in a bad mood when they get in the cab."
Curry, 59, has been in the taxi business 15 years, six as a night shift driver. Her clientele has ranged from prostitutes and intoxicated women who have been fighting with their boyfriends to criminals to casino nomads.
"I met a lot of very strange people," she said.
"We're better than bartenders because they figure they can literally tell us anything and they're never going to see us again."
Curry said a few stories of inebriated women still are fresh in her mind. She once picked up a woman at Reno and Meridian Avenue who was yelling at a man before she got into the cab.
The woman started kicking at the man with her high-heeled boots before getting in the car. Curry said she knew right then it was going to be a difficult ride.
"She started cussing and fighting with me," Curry said. "I pulled into the gas station and kicked her out. She called the police, and I told them what she was doing and they took her to detox."
Where's my car?
In addition to sending unruly passengers to the detox center, Curry has a track record of picking them up there the next day.
In spring 2000, she picked up a woman who didn't remember anything about the night before. The two of them spent three hours driving around, trying to find the woman's car.
"She had been in Bricktown so we started there. We went clear to Moore and she was finding stuff in her purse, different numbers," she said. "We finally found her car at the Habana Inn."
Regardless of the call, Curry said she enjoys meeting diverse people and taking them to their destinations. Most of her work now is doing contract rides for Medicare and Medicaid patients through Yellow Cab Co. She plans to drive another three years or so before retiring.
"It's a lifestyle. You get spoiled," she said. "When I worked in an office, you had to ask somebody's permission if you want a day off. With this if you don't want to go to work, you don't have to, but you also don't make any money. You have to be self-disciplined to do this."
Rose Byrne blows a sweet kiss at W’s Symmetry Live concert held at the W South Beach Hotel and Residences on Thursday (July 28) in Miami Beach, Fla.
The 32-year-old Damages actress looked fashion forward in a white couture top, a yellow leather Zimmermann skirt and Nicholas Kirkwood high heels.
Also pictured inside: Theophilus London, the electro-pop phenom who performed at the big event.
Be sure to look out for Rose’s film Bridesmaids, which comes out on DVD and Blu-ray on September 20.
Also, a special happy birthday to Rose, who just turned 32 on Sunday (July 24)! Happy Birthday Rose!